VANCOUVER—Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s push to control the North Pole may be good holiday season politics, but it risks stalling an already glacially slow effort to draw Canada’s Arctic borders.

His government filed a partial claim with the United Nations Monday that details how far it thinks Canada’s jurisdiction stretches off the Atlantic Coast, while signalling it will make a pitch for the North Pole in a later submission on Arctic boundaries.

Despite two decades, and nearly $200-million worth of pioneering undersea Arctic research by teams of specialists on icebreakers, in helicopters or camped out in High Arctic wasteland, the 47-page submission to the UN mentions the Arctic just once.

And that’s only to say Canada isn’t ready to say how far its extended continental shelf in the Arctic runs beyond the normal 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometre) limit. The only scientific data in the document is from the Atlantic Ocean.

To experts in the arcane, and increasingly contentious, world of drawing maritime boundaries, it looks like domestic politics has trumped science and international diplomacy.

“We have some of the best scientists in the world. It’s inconceivable that our guys don’t know where the end of the shelf is,” said James Manicom, a research fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo.

“More importantly, I don’t think the prime minister, and the Prime Minister’s Office, are literate in deep-sea geology. So if they decided it was important to claim the seabed underneath the North Pole, then they have interfered with an otherwise pretty clear scientific process.”

Claiming the North Pole makes a catchy Christmastime headline. But overreaching could ensnare Canada’s full territorial claim in the Arctic.

That’s because the UN commission shelves a claim if a country formally objects to the details in it, Manicom said. It has done so before with heated claims over the continental shelf in East Asia.

“So if we claim more shelf than we’re scientifically entitled to, and the Russians protest, that will be the end of our claim until we solve this with the Russians,” he said.

“What we risk here is getting into a political dispute, 15 years from now maybe, with Russia about who owns the North Pole, or the seabed under it, which of course won’t be this government’s problem.”

Denmark also covets the North Pole.

The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Canada ratified in 2003, gives maritime nations control over any undersea resources within 200 nautical miles of their coasts. Any country that can show its continental shelf runs continuously outside that limit can claim a larger territory, called the extended continental shelf.

Canada is one of 85 countries believed to have an extended continental shelf, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

International experts, including geologists from countries as diverse as Pakistan, China, Mozambique and Denmark, review those claims for the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

The commission does not settle disputes or hand down final judgments on the claims.

It only makes recommendations based on expert analysis of what can be complex scientific and technical data. In the end, lawyers and diplomats, not technocrats, have to sort out any disagreements.

Last year, when the commission dealt with an average two submissions a year, Manicom calculated it would take the UN body 27 years to process its current caseload.

“I think best case: 10 years. Probably within 20,” Manicom said. “That’s a best guess.”

It’s anyone’s guess how long it will take Canada’s technical experts to gather evidence backing the Harper government’s gambit for the North Pole. Then Canada’s complete Arctic sovereignty submission would join the long UN queue.

A formal dispute could tie it up indefinitely after that.

The main dispute is over the Lomonosov Ridge, which runs roughly 1,800 kilometres from the top of Ellesmere Island, across the North Pole and down to Russian waters.

Russia staked its claim with a publicity stunt in 2007, when one of its submarines planted a Russian flag on the polar seabed. The area is believed to be rich in oil, natural gas and minerals.

It’s beyond reach with current technology and in today’s climate. If the Arctic continues to warm, that could change, but it’s hard to imagine a country pumping oil from the North Pole in the midst of a global climate catastrophe as a winner.

Shelagh Grant, an author and historian who studies the jockeying over the Arctic, thinks, as many Arctic experts do, that any arguments over boundaries will be resolved peacefully.

Some have suggested the North Pole be declared an international zone, like the Antarctic. A 1961 treaty set aside territorial disputes there and declared a military-free zone for peaceful, scientific purposes.

Canada, Russia and Denmark are among more than 45 countries that signed the Antarctic treaty. But Grant doubts a similar agreement will settle the competition for control of the North Pole.

Instead, she sees converging international boundaries running north and meeting somewhere at the top of the planet after some tough negotiating to resolve any overlapping claims.

History shows that military and economic power strengthen a country’s negotiating position, she argues, which would give Russia a mammoth advantage in any bargaining with Canada over the North Pole.

“You’re talking about a pinpoint,” Grant said. “I think (most experts) would agree that what we’ll end up with is a compromise that will go to that point. It’s a lovely phrase, and argument, to fly: ‘We’re going to claim the North Pole!’

“But what is the North Pole exactly? A pinpoint.”

Once a country’s boundaries over the extended continental shelf are settled, it only has rights to living things on the sea floor and anything under the seabed.

“Other countries can drive ships over it. They can fly over it. They can fish in it. They can fight a war on it,” Manicom said. “It’s a very diluted definition of sovereignty you have with the continental shelf.

“So it’s not really sovereignty. It’s more like sovereign rights, which is an academic distinction, but I think it matters when it comes to politics.”

That’s lost in the often bellicose rhetoric from Arctic nations’ capitals, which Manicom suggests may be a symptom of an age-old strategy: warn of enemies abroad to win support at home.

“I never thought of the Canadian government as doing that kind of thing,” he said.

“But it does beg the question why the government isn’t celebrating the fact that we co-operate pretty well with the Russians, and why it goes about making this political interference in an otherwise pretty orderly process.”